Olympias’ relevance to Fate and Iskandar and Faker’s stories part 1
Both Alexander and Faker were raised by Olympias, and that’s why they are the kinds of people that they are, and why they lived the lives they had to live. Although Faker never met him when he was young, she was raised with the intent to protect him and to be devoted to him her entire life. That was her sole purpose as given to her by Olympias. So to understand both of those characters… you have to understand the environment that living with Olympias was. The deeply entrenched familial drama of Alexander the Great.
Where to even start with Olympias…
I’ll skip talking about the massive amount of mystery/mysticism surrounding Alexander that there’s no way he could’ve escaped for now. But to sum up: the amount of mysticism surrounding his entire life was so deeply entrenched that there was fundamentally no way he could have lived his life with human expectations or treatment. From the time of his conception to even now, he was considered a sort of demigod.
So let’s talk about Olympias and the conspiracies surrounding her and her general type of personality for a moment.
Olympias was a princess before she married Philip II. She was the eldest daughter of Neoptolemus I of Epirus. Her marriage to Philip II was largely political, but it’s said that Philip II was in love with her when he met her on an island where the two of them were engaging in the rites of the Mysteries of Cabeiri, two cthonic deities related to Hephaestus.
Olympias had two children with Philip II – Alexander III and Cleopatra. However, Philip II had a child from a previous marriage, a son named Philip III Arridaeus. Alexander was fond of Arridaeus, his half-brother. To cement Alexander’s position as the only rightful heir to the throne, as he was prophecied to be, Olympias allegedly poisoned Arridaeus at one point and left him intellectually disabled and unfit to rule. This did not diminish the relationship between Alexander and Arridaeus, as he was still fond of his brother despite Olympias’ actions, and took him along on his campaigns to protect him from being used as a political tool and to keep him safe.
Philip II took another wife referred to as Cleopatra-Eurydice. Eurydice was the niece of the general Attalus. Eurydice and Philip II had a daughter (and possibly a son), and Olympias grew fearful that her power would be threatened. Olympias was not well-liked. She was known to be a member of the orgiastic Cult of Dionysus who introduced snake-worship into the rites, and was known to sleep with snakes in her bed.
Many people were assuming that with Philip II’s new marriage to Eurydice that he would have a new, proper heir to the kingdom of Macedon, which infuriated Alexander as well, to the point of one episode at the new marriage’s wedding banquet, during which Attalus openly begged the gods for a lawful successor to the throne which so aggravated Alexander that he threw his cup at Attalus’ head and yelled “What am I then, a bastard?”. Philip II rose up to go and kill Alexander but was so drunk that he tripped and fell, prompting Alexander to reply “See there, the man who makes preparations to pass out of Europe into Asia, overturned in passing from one seat to another.”
After this, Alexander and Olympias went into voluntary exile (but an exile nonetheless, not permitted to return). After six months, a family friend helped mediate the situation and allowed both Alexander and Olympias to return home. But Olympias was still not well-received, and Alexander as the proper heir was still not guaranteed. As a Persian satrap offered his daughter to marry Arridaeus, Olympias and several of Alexander’s friends believed that this was a move intended to make Arridaeus the heir to the throne. Alexander sent a messenger named Thessalus to protest and say that the daughter should be married to a proper heir, like Alexander… and when Philip II found out about this, he grew angry, 1) saying Alexander deserves better (!?!) 2) exiling four of Alexander’s friends and having Thessalus brought back in chains.
In this same year Philip II had his and Olympias’ daughter Cleopatra married to Olympias’ brother Alexander I of Epirus to ally himself. As the situation mounted against Olympias and lead to her isolation, coincidentally, the incident with Pausanias (a former member of Philip II’s personal bodyguards who had been disgraced by being raped during an argument with another general, Attalus, and resulted in Philip II failing to punish Attalus for his crime) was escalating and it’s said that Olympias had a personal hand in Philip II’s assassination by Pausanias, supposedly providing horses for Pausanias to escape on.
As Alexander took the throne and launched his conquest, Olympias was the queen-regent de facto of Macedon in his absence along with Antipater, and was very well disliked, to the point where Antipater sent a very long letter full of complaints to Alexander (to which Alexander, despite his cordial but souring relationship with his mother, remarked “One tear from my mother would cancel a thousand letters like that”).
During the Wars of the Diadochi after Alexander the Great’s death, Olympias attempted to continue her control of Macedon, but the general Cassander captured her after several campaigns. She was to be executed, but he called forth all of the families of those whom she had killed and Olympias was stoned to death in public and left to rot, being ordered to not have a funeral.
So where to even go from here….
It is apparently that in Fate’s rendition of Olympias that she is very power-hungry and cunning, willing to do anything to ensure Alexander’s success and her control over Macedonia. Fate!Iskandar even has his natural enemy denoted as his mother, Olympias.
To have a life that is so hell-bent on being successful that failure is not an option is torment. To have somebody actively killing your other family members in order to cement your success will no doubt have an effect on how you grow up.
In the Alexander Romance, Olympias’ behind-the-scenes actions are still present, as her snake-worship is romanticized to that of a coupling with an Egyptian Magus-King Nectanebo under the guise of her conceiving a child with the Libyan god Ammon (rather than Philip II), and Alexander’s complicated family drama is still present, with Alexander killing Nectanebo and Nectanebo confessing that he is his biological father as he dies.
Basically …………… No matter where you go ……….. Alexander’s family is fucked up. Both Philip II and Olympias share the blame. I will write later about how there was no way for Alexander to live a normal human life later but I need to express how politically charged all of the family drama was and how much like murder and humiliation was surrounding so much of it from the start.
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